Global Marketer Week

Big brands investing in talent

The world's biggest brands are investing heavily in talent in key areas such as media, digital and integrated marketing communications (IMC).

A survey of World Federation of Advertiser member companies found that the number of global roles across media, digital and IMC had increased by more than half in up to 31% of respondents during the last five years.

At a regional level, the number of companies where the number of such roles had increased more the half was 38% for IMC and 50% for both media and digital with a further 13% increase in combined media and digital roles.

Based on 15 responses from companies spending a total of more than $15bn in annual media investment, the results show that despite the common perception that many specialist skills are being outsourced to agencies, companies are actually working hard to build up their own expertise.

In fact, 82% of those surveyed agreed with the statement “We are closing the media 'knowledge-gap' within our organisation”.

Much of this expertise is being recruited at a global or regional level with the aim of ensuring the knowledge and best practice is trickled down to local teams.Investment in digital has been particularly heavy at a global and regional level, likely reflecting the multinational nature of digital platforms.

Despite this investment, however, many advertisers still rely on their agencies for key tasks. Forty-two per cent of those questioned agreed that they still relied too much on their media agencies and 67% said agencies provided media training.